Copyright: “The lobbying Gafam is unacceptable”

Second round. The match between the content creators to the giants in the digital for just compensation on the Internet takes today. After a first negative vote last July, the directive on the right of the author comes before the european Parliament on Wednesday noon. Mep Virginie Rozière, a member of the radical left, is actively supporting this text at the side, in particular, of Jean-Marie Cavada. She has held Tuesday a press conference with the AFP journalist Sammy Ketz, the title of which was “An opportunity that is vital to the press !” The chosen one returns to the two articles, 11 and 13, which crystallize the opposition for several months.

mep Virginie Rozière, a member of the radical left, defending the directive on copyright.

european Parliament

The european Parliament is preparing to vote this Wednesday on the directive on copyright, the subject of strong opposition between the content creators and the giants of the digital world. Why such a confrontation ?

The previous law dating from 2001, a time when YouTube and Facebook didn’t exist and when Google was only three years of existence. Today, it is time to take into consideration the impact of the digital on culture and information. Two articles sparked a confrontation of rare violence.

READ ALSO >> “The directive, copyright law defends the wrong the press”

The first should give rise to a remuneration of publishers and journalists by Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Apple, which all broadcast their articles. The second article is based on the same principle. It act the protection of cultural works, the music and the video, exploited by platforms such as YouTube. These sites will still be able to disseminate these contents, but will have to pass through a prior agreement with the artists. In the absence of agreement, the platforms will need to block the dissemination of works upstream, taking care to keep always off-line.

Since the month of June, a lot of lies have been circulated on the impact of these two items. For two weeks this summer, I received 40,000 e-mails considering that this text threatened the Internet and the free flow of information and culture on the web. I had never seen such a mobilization since the directive on firearms.

The campaign to Save the Internet against the article 13, called the “mechanism of censorship,” has generated more than 70,000 tweets in Europe and more than 88 000 from Washington. Evidence that the lobby operates from within the United States. We can see who is trying to influence the vote, and that is unacceptable. The european sovereignty is being played out in the face of the Gafam (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft).

The presses, belgian, Spanish and German have tried to pay Google for the diffusion of press articles. The search engine has closed Google News and the audience of news sites collapsed. The directive does not risk, does it not, to be counter-productive ?

do you really Think that Google can afford to shut its news service in the whole of Europe ? The economic cost and the impact on his image would be very heavy to pay. If this company is already too powerful and that we can not do anything against it, so as to dissolve the european Parliament. But given the ways she has made to block this directive, I think we are on the right track.

of Course, but the publishers aren’t they also guilty of having long distributed their articles free on the web betting on the run to the audience and advertising revenue ?

I think at the time, it was difficult to foresee that the Gafam were going to capture all of the advertising revenue by playing the intermediary between the users and the publishers. It is easy to say today that it was all written ahead of time, but these advertising agencies have become oligopolies, thanks to their technology. They now overwrite the entire supply chain. It is an assumption of power on culture and the press, both “ubérisés” before the time.

More than 400 hours of video are posted every minute on YouTube. The company believes that it will be impossible to do everything “validate by lawyers” and comply with article 13. How do you respond ?

This statement is false. There are already systems for the automated detection of copyrighted content, such as Content ID, created by YouTube. This solution is even used by well-known each other… And when I see that the Wikimedia foundation climbs to the front and believes that, with this directive the site, Wikipedia will not publish the journalistic sources related to the definition of a word, again it is a lie. We can see that this foundation, which is funded in part by Google, is aligned with the interests of the search engine.

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